Monday Marketing….After a Brain Dump…..And Asking for Help…….
October 8th, 2012 | 
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Over a week ago I made the following list of things I wanted to focus on for the coming week for marketing…..
update ebay “About Me” page; schedule for pattern release; review and comment on blogs – been doing better on this; look at TAFA marketing for holidays; Handmadeology post on community for this week; Southern Cal artist packet completed; Stumble pages; new small gallery; contacted CraftGossip about quilting info
Well, based on yesterday’s post, I haven’t made a huge amount of progress, to my way of thinking. But – I did get a couple of these done, and now I have a couple of major deadlines to meet within the two weeks. I was locked out of Word Press this morning, but now I’m back and working on things. I will have a tutorial up on CraftGossip, which makes having the updates done on the website more critical. Plus, I will be having a guest post on a publisher’s blog, so again the website needs to be worked on. The Handmadeology post on the importance of community was completed, and it had a lot of good feedback. I’ve been enjoying Stumble and collecting and pinning some great images. Now I have to figure out how to add the Stumble logo to the blog.
Now about asking for help: I would ask you to stop by our main website and give me some feedback about any updates, changes, or new products you would like to see. I have some ideas, but for some reason I can’t seem to really get a “feel” for a lot of changes. I’d appreciate any comments and suggestions.
Posted in CraftGossip, Handmadeology, marbled fabrics, Monday Marketing | 
Tags: CraftGossip, Handmadeology, marbled fabrics, Monday Marketing
Linda, I’ve been following silently for a few months, since I started marbling. Love your website–it is nice and clean, easy to follow.
The only suggestion I would recommend is to make the background a little lighter. The darker color is hard on old eyes.
Keep up your great work, I love what you do.
Thank you, Angie! I’ve been looking at big changes, but as soon as I read your comment, I realized I have trouble sometimes seeing the background. I’ll put that on the list of items for the web designer, who is absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for reading and following along. Ain’t marbling the most fun?
Hmmmmmmm…. The site looks fine to me, but if you want us to get nit-picky, things can always be improved, right?
The biggest thing I can see right off the bat is that the name that pops out at you is “the art of fabric” and that’s what people will remember as they move through the pages. In branding something, you need to have Marble-T Design consistently shown everywhere, but it’s also different from your url, marbledfab. Still if someone did a search for marble design (which they might remember), they might find the site, but if they search for “the art of fabric”, it’s such a generic term that thousands of sites could show up.
Changing that would be a big project, but it’s something to think about as you move forward on any site changes. I’ve never really understood the T in your name. Did you used to do t-shirts?
The name issue is something many of us struggle with. I see TAFA members with a cute business name, then their personal name became famous over time, so they might use that, the blog is something else and then everywhere else (flickr, youtube, etc.) also have different names. As a business matures in its identity and base, its critical to clean things up and have it all be the same. I closed down my blog earlier this year because of that and moved everything over to wordpress. It was hard to do because I had a lot of content there and a nice following, but it was called Fiber Focus when my business is Rayela Art.
A much simpler design thing: Get standardized buttons for facebook and twitter that are the same size. On my computer, the graphic at the top looks nice and centered and then those two kind of junk it up and you don’t see the links below them unless you scroll down. Try to keep the front page all above the fold.
Hope it helps! I felt tired looking at your to-do list! We all have so much on our plates, eh?
Rachel